Engineering Students Earn Fourth Place in International ASME Student Design Competition

Western New England University ASME Student Design Competition team took home a fourth place finish overall in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) 2016 Student Design Competition Finals. The competition was held November 11-17 at the Phoenix Convention Center as part of the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) and hosted twenty-one student teams from 10 countries.

The 2016 Western New England University College of Engineering team, guided by team mentor PhD Fellow David Greenslade ’10/’G’15, included seniors Zachary Kusnierz and Joshua Holley, and sophomore Adam Testa.

“Their advisor, David Greenslade, played an important role in guiding and mentoring the team to accomplish this honor,” said Dr. Said Dini, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “I congratulate the team and David for their hard work and putting Western New England University’s name on the map again.”

Engineering students representing universities from the United States, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Turkey, Peru, and China took part in the final round of this year’s competition, which asked students to design and build prototypes of a battery-powered, compact manufacturing system that could launch paper projectiles through the air. The competition’s panel of judges assessed the entries on criteria, including total distance traveled by the team’s projectiles and the total measured volume of each system.

According to their website, ASME is a membership organization that encourages “collaboration, knowledge sharing, career enrichment, and skills development across all engineering disciplines, toward a goal of helping the global engineering community develop solutions to benefit lives and livelihoods.” Founded in 1880 ASME and has grown to include more than 130,000 members in 151 countries. Thirty-two thousand of these members are students.